Academician Alexandrov told why Nobel laureate Ekimov left Russia

A talented scientist was unable to work due to financial difficulties

Among the Nobel laureates, immigrants from Russia, another of our compatriots has appeared. 13 years after Andrei Geim received the prestigious prize for experiments with graphene, it was awarded to Alexei Ekimov, the discoverer of nanocrystalline semiconductor quantum dots. Like Game, he lives abroad in the United States. We phoned RAS academician Evgeny Alexandrov, who told us what was the reason for his departure from the country.

The announcement of the 2023 Nobel laureates in chemistry was preceded by a surprise: someone, before the official announcement of the names of the scientists, leaked them to the media – our Western colleagues received an email from the Nobel committee itself. A few hours after this, the information that was in that letter was confirmed: the winners were the Russian scientist Alexey Ekimov, a specialist in physical chemistry, the American Louis Bruce and the American chemist of French and Tunisian origin Mungi Bavendi. The prize was awarded to them for the discovery and development of semiconductor quantum dots (nanocrystals), which are now used everywhere – from LED lamps to solar panels and light detectors, as more advanced sources for creating the luminescence effect.

The name of Alexey Ekimov is at the very beginning of the list for a reason – he is the discoverer of these points, who carried out the first studies of their electronic and optical properties.

After graduating from Leningrad State University in 1967 (he studied at the department of molecular physics), Alexey Ekimov worked at the Physico-Technical Institute. A.F. Ioffe, and then at the State Optical Institute named after S.I. Vavilov (GOI).

Academician Evgeniy Aleksandrov, who himself worked at the State Optical Institute in 1974, was the one who awarded Ekimov a candidate’s degree. His dissertation, according to Aleksandrov, was already related to semiconductors. Later Ekimov defended his doctoral dissertation. This was already an article on the topic “Quantum dimensional phenomena in semiconductor microcrystals.”

“With the beginning of perestroika, Alexey left for the USA,” Evgeny Borisovich told MK. – The reason was the almost complete lack of funding for scientific work at GOI. This institute belonged to the military-industrial complex, which was experiencing a severe reduction in funds.

Since 1999, Ekimov began working in the USA in one of the innovative companies as a chief researcher. According to his biography, he was also

visiting professor at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, at the Claude Bernard University of Lyon, at the Max Planck Institute (Germany) and at Osaka University (Japan).